All Things New and Terrifying

I have been really looking forward to this book! You know I love an anthology, and the TOC for Our Shadows Have Claws is packed with talent. Fifteen original short stories offer monsters galore, every thing from vampires to cannibals, ghost-witches and wolf-gods to death itself. So creature feature lovers be sure to add this dark, fantastical anthology to your reading list! Featuring the work of authors like Courtney Alameda, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Claribel A. Ortega, and many more, Our Shadows Have Claws is a celebration of Latine mythology from some of the most exciting voices in YA horror and fantasy.

If you’re looking for some of the most haunted real estate in horror, you need to read Darcy Coates. She always manages to touch on the things that scare me most. Gallows Hill is a story as much about family secrets and greed as it is about creepy tunnels and undead creatures. The Hull family has always owned the Gallows Hill Winery, and thrived off its success. But beneath the surface of their good fortune is a dark truth that generation after generation has been forced to conceal — and for which they’ve had to pay a heavy price. Margot Hull was sent away from Gallows Hill as a child, but when her parents die suddenly in their sleep, she finds herself on the doorstep of a home she barely remembers. A house full of dark secrets, bitter memories, and — quite possibly — a curse that seeks to take her life as well.

A retelling of Stephen King’s Carrie through the lens of racism and bullying at a small Georgia high school, Jackson’s The Weight of Blood is the latest in a storied horror tradition of “proms you do not want to attend.” Madison has been passing for white her whole life, on the insistence of her abusive father. But when she is revealed to be biracial, the bullying that normally plagues Maddy’s high school existence goes from bad to worse. The ensuing public fallout of a bullying video gone viral has the student body scrambling to repair their school’s reputation, but their plan for an integrated prom won’t be the solution they expect it to be. Not when Maddy’s classmates have decided that she still has to pay for her lies. Not when Maddy still has one secret left to to hide.

I love horror and horror-themed graphic novels! Particularly when they’re witchy. Coven is about a young woman with magical powers, but Emsy doesn’t care about training as a fire elemental and growing her magical skills. She left that behind her along with her family’s coven and her dreary hometown in upstate New York. But when a spate of mysterious murders that are clearly magical in nature put her family in harms way, Emsy has no choice but to leave behind her friends and her girlfriend in California and trade surfing for magical training. Mastering the magical skills she tried to ignore may be Emsy’s only chance to find the murderer before her own family meets a terrible end.